A free question from The Purpose of Menopause, Volume I
Is It an Ending?
This is the question underneath the others, the one many of us are afraid to ask because we suspect we already know the answer. The definitions name what stops. The jokes name what is lost. So it is natural to wonder whether the change is simply a door closing.
The answer offered here is no. It is not offered as comfort. It comes from a much larger picture of what a woman’s life is, and of what she was made for.
A Grand Rite of Passage
Becoming The Grand-Mother is a grand rite of passage. She is at the very heart of our experience, wisdom, creativity, beauty and service. All women will become The Grand-Mother, not necessarily through lineage, but through the alchemy of our passage. Menopause is the fire that rebirths and recalibrates us. She is the reason why the value of our contribution to ourselves and humanity multiplies, well beyond the narrow frameworks we’ve been given. We are here to create, protect and sustain life. Not only in the form of children, but in dreams, in visions and in the creation of future worlds.
Women are here on earth to surrender and transmute ourselves and the world, through our every feeling, tremor, trial and rite of passage. Like the oceans, we are vast, healing, cyclical and forever restorative. In perfect rhythm, we process and transform the suffering of life into ecstatic bursts of pleasure, renewal and sustainability. Changing is how we keep time: From the moment we first draw breath, to the moment we bleed and become mothers, we are transformed. From the moment we connect to our pleasure to the moment we make love, we are exalted. From the moment we conceive to the moment we birth or bless children, we are anointed. The moment we reclaim menopause and become The Mystic, we are sustained. And at the moment of our physical death we cross a threshold into the eternal.
What stirs our wombs is divine design. It is the blueprint for new paradigms and the pulse of a planet being born through us again and again. Our inner unfoldings ripple outward, they bless our communities and heal Mother Earth. We were created for this, these rites of passage, these deaths and resurrections and these sacred makings. It’s time for us to rise and remember that women, and the journeys we carry, are the revelations and catalysts for our collective reawakening.
An Honored Guest
What if we perceived menopause as our co-collaborator, our partner in growth and renewal? What if this supposed “ending” they call infertility, is actually preparing women for a higher calling? A vital part of the infrastructure required for women to cross over into vast new terrain. Now menopause is a gift, an honored guest and a new vision for our future. Infertility does not render us powerless, she liberates us. Our bodies pulse with ancestral memory and our very presence nourishes generations…daughters, granddaughters and a world starving for the frequencies that only women carry. Menopause is personal, collective, mythic and evolutionary. She reshapes the frequency of our consciousness and she offers herself as an emissary for the unfolding of humanity.
The Answer, So Far
Menopause is not an ending. It is one passage in a life made of passages, each of which has changed us and carried us forward. What looks like a door closing is the threshold of a grand rite of passage.
Ask it yourself: Which ending in my life turned out to be a beginning?
This is one of eight questions in The Purpose of Menopause, Volume I of The Becoming of the Mystic, Andrea Iapaolo’s series on the questions women ask, and the answers we were never given. Leave your email for the next question, and be the first to hear when each new volume opens.
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